Providing industrial maintenance services through a virtual enterprise network: the e-meccanica project

Maintenance services are important sources of business for small and medium enterprises (SME’s), locally acting as service providers for owner-operators of industrial plants. These SME’s are more and more in trouble facing the strong competition of low-cost consortia using not- qualified labour. Maybe they should invest money in order to innovate their processes and their services, thus offering their customers superior value and gaining some sort of premium price. While this is hard to be faced individually, a suggested and widespread solution is to constitute a virtual network, as a breeding environment, with different partners (competitors, research centers, solution providers, engineering firms, etc.). This paper reports about the e-meccanica project, specifically targeted to support the establishment of a locally operating Virtual Enterprise Network (VEN), in order to offer industrial maintenance services. In this paper we describe the first and the second stages of the project, regarding the organization of the VEN and the development of a CBM platform and the deployment of a networked service delivery system, as prototypes of innovative services.